Origins Cheese is an ancient food whose origins
predate recorded history. There is no conclusive evidence indicating where cheesemaking originated, whether in
Europe,
Central Asia or the
Middle East. The earliest proposed dates for the origin of cheesemaking range from around 8000 BCE, when sheep were first
domesticated. Because animal skins and inflated internal organs have provided storage vessels for a range of foodstuffs since ancient times, it is probable that the process of cheese making was discovered accidentally by storing milk in a container made from the stomach of an animal, resulting in the milk being turned to
curd and
whey by the rennet from the stomach. There is a
legend—with variations—about the discovery of cheese by an Arab trader who used this method of storing milk. The earliest evidence of cheesemaking in the archaeological record dates back to 5500 BCE and is found in what is now
Kuyavia, Poland, where strainers coated with
milk-fat molecules have been found. The earliest evidence of cheesemaking in the
Mediterranean dates back to 5200 BCE, on the coast of the
Dalmatia region of
Croatia. Cheesemaking may have begun independently of this by the pressing and salting of curdled milk to preserve it. Observation that the effect of making cheese in an animal stomach gave more solid and better-textured curds may have led to the deliberate addition of rennet. Early
archeological evidence of
Egyptian cheese has been found in
Egyptian tomb murals, dating to about 2000 BCE. A 2018 scientific paper stated that cheese dating to approximately 1200 BCE was found in ancient Egyptian tombs. The earliest ever discovered preserved cheese was found on mummies in
Xiaohe Cemetery in the Taklamakan Desert in
Xinjiang,
China, dating back as early as 1615 BCE.
Ancient Greece and Rome Ancient
Greek mythology credited
Aristaeus with the discovery of cheese.
Homer's
Odyssey (8th century BCE) describes the monstrous
Cyclops making and storing sheep's and goats' milk cheese (translation by
Samuel Butler):
Columella's
De Re Rustica (c. 65 CE) details a cheesemaking process involving rennet coagulation, pressing of the curd, salting, and aging. According to
Pliny the Elder, it had become a sophisticated enterprise by the time the
Roman Empire came into being. Pliny the Elder mentions in his writings
Caseus Helveticus, a hard cheese produced by the
Helvetii. Cheese was an everyday food and cheesemaking a mature art in the Roman empire.
Pliny's Natural History (77 CE) devotes a chapter (XI, 97) to describing the diversity of cheeses enjoyed by Romans of the early Empire. He stated that the best cheeses came from the villages near
Nîmes, but did not keep long and had to be eaten fresh. Cheeses of the
Alps and
Apennines were as remarkable for their variety then as now. A
Ligurian cheese was noted for being made mostly from sheep's milk, and some cheeses produced nearby were stated to weigh as much as a thousand pounds each. Goats' milk cheese was a recent taste in Rome, improved over the "medicinal taste" of
Gaul's similar cheeses by
smoking. Of cheeses from overseas, Pliny preferred those of
Bithynia in Asia Minor.
Post-Roman Europe Casanatensis (14th century) 1000,
Anglo-Saxons in England named
a village by the
River Thames , meaning "Cheese farm". In 1022, it is mentioned that
Vlach (
Aromanian) shepherds from
Thessaly and the
Pindus mountains, in modern
Greece, provided cheese for
Constantinople. Many cheeses popular today were first recorded in the late
Middle Ages or after. Cheeses such as
Cheddar around 1500,
Parmesan in 1597,
Gouda in 1697, and
Camembert in 1791 show post-Middle Ages dates. In 1546,
The Proverbs of John Heywood claimed "
the moon is made of a green cheese" (
Greene may refer here not to the color, as many now think, but to being new or unaged). Variations on this sentiment were long repeated and
NASA exploited this myth for an
April Fools' Day spoof announcement in 2006.
Modern era Until its modern spread along with European culture, cheese was nearly unheard of in east Asian cultures and in the pre-Columbian Americas and had only limited use in sub-Mediterranean Africa, mainly being widespread and popular only in Europe, the Middle East, the
Indian subcontinent,
Tibet, and areas influenced by those cultures. But with the spread, first of European imperialism, and later of Euro-American culture and food, cheese has gradually become known and increasingly popular worldwide. The first factory for the industrial production of cheese opened in Switzerland in 1815, but large-scale production first found real success in the United States. Credit usually goes to Jesse Williams, a dairy farmer from
Rome, New York, who in 1851 started making cheese in an
assembly-line fashion using the milk from neighboring farms; this made cheddar-like cheese one of the first US
industrial foods. Within decades, hundreds of such commercial dairy associations existed. The 1860s saw the beginnings of mass-produced rennet, and by the turn of the century scientists were producing pure microbial cultures. Before then, bacteria in cheesemaking had come from the environment or from recycling an earlier batch's whey; the pure cultures meant a more standardized cheese could be produced. Factory-made cheese overtook traditional cheesemaking in the
World War II era, and factories have been the source of most cheese in America and Europe ever since. By 2012, cheese was one of the most
shoplifted items from supermarkets worldwide. File:Hartkaese HardCheeses.jpg|Hard cheeses in Germany File:Ricotta affumicata della sila.jpg|A piece of soft curd cheese, oven-baked to increase shelf life File:Formaggi.JPG|Cheese in a market
in Italy File:Cheese display, Cambridge MA - DSC05391.jpg|Cheese display in grocery store, United States == Production ==